Anti-whalers at IWC call for more humane killing

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If whales have to be hunted, humans must strive to limit the suffering of the world's biggest animals as they die, anti-hunting members of the International Whaling Commission said.

As ill-tempered talks on the future of whales reached their third day, the issue of cruelty highlighted the bitter divide at the IWC between anti-whalers and opponents who are trying to lift an 18-year-old ban on commercial whaling.

"It's bad enough that some nations represented in this room continue to slaughter the world's whales. They could at least try to make the process more humane," New Zealand's Conservation Minister Chris Carter told the conference as he proposed a motion calling for more humane killing methods.

New Zealand and its anti-whaling allies want the IWC to set guidelines on killing whales to reduce the time they take to die. These might include the calibre of weapons used and the weather conditions at sea in which hunting would be allowed.

Hunting nations Japan, Norway and Iceland, which kill some 1400 whales a year under a variety of get-out clauses from the ban, said New Zealand's proposal was irrelevant and unfair.

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Images of seas turning red as whales are hauled aboard ships disgust many people in countries opposed to hunting. The German delegation said 90-95 per cent of the German electorate wanted an end to all whaling due to cruelty.

Television naturalist David Attenborough has endorsed a study by the World Society for the Protection of Animals that found whales take an average of two minutes to die after being struck by grenade-loaded harpoons, the usual hunting method, and often much longer.

"[The report] contains hard scientific dispassionate evidence that the is no humane way to kill a whale at sea," Attenborough said in the report's foreword.

Pro-hunting countries accuse their opponents of exploiting the emotional aspect of whaling.

They say killing methods are more humane than in the hunting of land animals such as deer, and see the cruelty issue as a distraction from the IWC's main role of protecting whales from extinction.

"We should not single out whaling as some kind of improper activity while we accept the killing of other animals using even less appropriate methods," said Iceland's Commissioner Stefan Asmundsson.

The IWC meeting could be a turning point for the intergovernmental body, set up in 1946 at a time when many whale species faced extinction because of over-exploitation.

Whaling nations, supported by many new members from developing countries, are pushing for the IWC's ban on commercial whaling to be lifted and replaced by a system of sustainable quotas and a system to ensure whalers do not cheat.

Allegations by campaign group the International Fund for Animal Welfare that Japan bought votes by granting aid to countries that joined the IWC on its side prompted a furious response by Tokyo and its allies calling for a retraction.

The IFAW stood its ground and the row rumbled on in the background as the IWC got on with the key part of its work - deciding whether to endorse a proposal on a system for monitoring adherence to whaling quotas that could form the basis for the commercial whaling ban to be lifted.

IWC chairman Henrik Fischer of Denmark wants the IWC to approve his controversial system at a meeting in South Korea next year. Japan, which wants to kill at least 3000 whales a year, has said it will quit the body unless it is approved then.